North From Rome, Page 4

  “Wouldn’t you tell me what he is?” he asked angrily.

  “Only three people have known that. One was my brother Mario, and he is dead: a suicide, it was supposed.” (How sad, the princess had said, how indescribably sad.) “One is Tony, my friend—” she glanced at him quickly “—my only true friend, and he is in hiding. And the third is I, Rosana Di Feo. Do you expect me to tell you the truth about Pirotta unless you stay here and help Tony and me? We don’t want to be ‘suicides’ like my brother.”

  Lammiter caught her arm and prevented her from walking in front of a large American car feeling its way slowly out from the Hotel Excelsior’s porte-cochère. He looked at the piles of luggage on the sidewalk, at the usual crowd waiting in front of the hotel, their cars edging in and out of the driveway. It was all so normal, so routine, that he told himself, This is fantastic. Here’s the Excelsior, and women with diamond clips and tight silk suits; and that’s the garden wall of the American Embassy down the street; and over there is the bookstall where I get the Tribune and Time and the Rome Daily American and anything else in English. I know this quarter backwards. The people look the same, the voices sound the same; the street is filled with sunshine and noise, with warmed spines and easy smiles, with pretty barelegged girls in low-necked dresses. And beside me is the prettiest of them all, talking earnestly about suicide, glancing over her shoulder at that moment as if she expected we were being followed. Fantastic, the whole thing’s fantastic. It just can’t be happening. Not to me.

  And yet, it was.

  She hadn’t even noticed the near-accident. Or perhaps she brushed it away as quickly as she freed her arm. “You pretend to be shocked when I offer you revenge,” she said, intent on her own emotions, and her voice trembled as if she were on the verge of tears. “What else can I appeal to? Your patriotism? Don’t you want to help your country? Or will you do less for it than I am willing to do?”

  He said gently, trying to calm her down, “Now, Rosie—ease up, old girl, or you’ll be bursting into sobs. Wouldn’t Pirotta find that interesting?” And as she took a deep breath, he went on, his eyes watching, “Tell me—what kind of business is Pirotta caught up in? What is it?”

  The moment of weakness was over. Her bitterness returned. Again she ignored his question. “What else must I say? Shall I fall back on the appeal to Sir Galahad? If you aren’t a patriot, aren’t you at least romantic? You may not consider me much of a lady any more, but I assure you—I am in distress.”

  He persisted with his own questions. “What is Pirotta’s racket? He is mixed up with something unpleasant, not honest, secret. Isn’t he?”

  She bit her lip.

  “What is it?”

  “Not here. They are still watching us probably.”

  “Must I stay in Rome—” he began angrily.

  “But quietly, don’t advertise it,” she warned him quickly.

  “—to hear what kind of a man Pirotta is?”

  She halted at the corner of the street, her eyes on the red light which was about to change to green. She put her hand out to say goodbye. He caught it and held it. “Rosana—look, if I stay in Rome, will you answer my questions?”

  She looked up at him then. “Yes, all of them.” Her voice softened. “So gladly, so very gladly.”

  Around them he heard the beginning of complaints. “What is wrong with those traffic lights?” someone asked angrily. Then Rosana laughed, and glanced towards the white-uniformed policeman who was in charge of the lights. Lammiter looked, too. The policeman was watching them both with a broad smile.

  “Is he giving us time to say goodbye?” Lammiter asked.

  “He’s a romantic. That’s what Tony would call him,” Rosana said, and took her hand away from Lammiter’s grasp. “I want you to meet Tony. And he wants to meet you.” The policeman pressed the switch, the lights changed, and Rosana stepped off the sidewalk. Lammiter watched her cross the street. Then he turned and walked slowly back to the café. He needed another drink.

  She’s got you, Bill, he told himself. She’s got what she wanted. She wanted you to stay in Rome. And you agreed. Then he called himself a fool, an idiot, a moron, and larded the descriptions with imaginative adjectives. He might plead that he hadn’t actually committed himself, yet he had been near enough to a promise to be irritated by a sense of guilt if he were to retreat from it. Then he swung away from his own emotions to take another look at Miss Di Feo. At this distance, away from those large dark eyes which could look so appealing and afraid at one and the same time, away from the best collection of physical attributes he had ever noticed gathered together around one spine, away from the soft voice and its gentle inflections (had a man ever fallen in love with a voice?), he could think of her more rationally. Miss Di Feo was a very smart little girl.

  What facts had she given him?

  None.

  Nothing but a sense of danger threatening Eleanor—as if he hadn’t been too ready to believe the worst about her Goddamned count. Why should he go on worrying about Eleanor, anyway? She was just about as smart a little girl as Miss Di Feo, and as pretty, too, but don’t let him start remembering that. Anyone who could get engaged to a determined bachelor on the night of his first play’s success was not in need of much worry. And anyone who could manage to use her father’s name (he was a magazine editor when he wasn’t busy worrying about Eleanor) to find herself in Rome for Easter (just when a fiancé was deciding he had to settle down to work and no more parties and goodbye to all publicity and let’s hie me to a monastery—preferably Trappist) was not in need of any worry at all. So there it was: Easter in Rome, important friends of her father’s who took her around, a nice job as mixture of linguist and coffee-brewer and decorative asset in the Embassy, and Eleanor could write charming letters back to New York. Until the last one. That was on the thirtieth day of June... “Dear Bill, I am sorry, but—” His name was Luigi Pirotta. A title, too. A very, very old family. Handsome and charming. “In some ways, so very like you, Bill. I know you’d approve of him. And this decision I’ve made, however painful for both of us, is wise. You have your work and all the people connected with it. There isn’t much room for me—and I was never quite able to fit into the picture. So I shouldn’t be surprised if this letter was something of a relief to you. I know you’ll understand.” Understand? After the first angry shock, he broke all engagements, including that visit to Hollywood, and took the first plane that had a cancelled reservation, the new ideas for his next play already sifting away from his mind like grains of sand scattering before a wind. The weakness of determined bachelors was that they took an engagement seriously. Once committed to the idea of marriage, they expected it to stay with them for a lifetime. But take Eleanor— she was the kind who’d have at least one broken engagement, three upset marriages, and come out thriving on all the wasted emotions and bitter recriminations. If he wanted to be sorry for anyone at all, he. ought to be pitying this fellow Pirotta.

  Just as he had persuaded himself—using every unfair argument, he would admit later—that he had no more interest in Eleanor, he saw her. She was sitting with the princess who was so afraid of loneliness, the two simpering boys, Pirotta, and—back with him once more—the thin, vaguely familiar Englishman. And Eleanor had seen him, too. It was too late to change course. All he could do was to walk on. He’d drink his beer somewhere else.

  But he didn’t. For the old princess suddenly called out as he approached their table, “There’s Rosana’s young man! Eleanor, didn’t you say you knew him? I’d like to meet him! Stop him, somebody!”

  If only to save Eleanor embarrassment, he halted and smiled. “Hallo, Eleanor, how are you?” Besides, it might be time to meet Pirotta. The Italian had risen to his feet. Yes, we’re just about the same height, Lammiter thought: perhaps I could give him half an inch and he could give me seven pounds. He drew himself erect. Pirotta was holding his head pretty high, too. Over Eleanor’s smooth crown of pale blonde hair, their eyes met.


  The princess laughed. “Isn’t this delicious?” she asked, watching them carefully. “I adore Americans.”

  5

  There are some remarks at the beginning of an encounter that sound a warning bell: the wise man listens, takes heed, and makes off in the direction that will lead him most quickly out of firing range. So Bill Lammiter almost continued on his way, leaving the princess with her own special store of irony into which she would dip her well-sharpened darts. But Eleanor, quite unwittingly, changed his mind for him. “How funny to meet you here!” She smiled nervously at Pirotta. “Why, we were talking about you only this morning!” Then the smile trembled, and she bit her lip nervously, as if Pirotta’s response had not been encouraging.

  “I’m flattered,” Lammiter said. And he remembered Rosana’s words: They have a good source of information on you. Indeed they have, he thought, as he smiled down at Eleanor. He hadn’t really believed Rosana, not altogether. But at this moment, he began to believe a good deal more of what she had said. And now Eleanor, her thin delicate face turning to each of them anxiously, her blue-grey eyes looking darker grey (as they always did when she was nervous), her long slender body tense, had begun making the introductions. She gave the appearance of doing this very expertly, but Lammiter never managed to catch the princess’s name. It sounded something like Zabaglione, which was most unlikely unless an ancestor had spent his life whipping up Marsala and hot egg yolks. But the thin middle-aged Englishman turned out to the Bertrand Whitelaw, a journalist who spent much of the year in Italy, visited America for lecture tours, wrote weekly columns for a London paper and seasonal articles for a New York literary magazine, and produced an occasional book on whither are we drifting, alack, alas. A slightly younger version of his tired and troubled face had occasionally peeked out from the glossy pages of high-fashion magazines, where American women were now having their minds as well as their chin lines lifted. For Mr. Whitelaw was an Authority. (Lammiter had never been quite sure on what Whitelaw was an authority, but then writers have a healthy disrespect for one another.)

  The two boys embarrassed Lammiter by studying him with open approval. He wasn’t quite sure what nationality they were, didn’t even listen to their names. They now posed for him with heads cocked to one side, their brown eyes so liquid that they threatened to pour out of the large sockets and cascade over the beardless cheeks. But no one paid any attention to them, and they gradually grew disconsolate as the princess didn’t even twitch their leash. They became silent and motionless, as unnoticed as the ashtrays on the table.

  The princess had her sharp eyes on more entrancing sport. In her white face, their strange amber colour glowed with anticipation. Her small red tongue ran its little point across her thin scarlet lips, gathering distilled malice. The dry ends of her russet-dyed hair seemed to spring loose with the electricity of her emotions, as she peered at Lammiter and then at Pirotta. She smiled. “How nice this is! Luigi, isn’t there a chair for Mr. Lammiter? Find a waiter!” She turned to Bill Lammiter. “He’s my nephew,” she said. “My only brother’s only son. He’s a dear boy. Aren’t you, Luigi?”

  Pirotta refused to be baited. He smiled, and found a chair for Bill Lammiter. “What will you have to drink?” he asked amiably. The princess looked disappointed, but Eleanor relaxed for the first time, and all her old charm suddenly uncurled from its tight bud of worry, and blossomed. Yes, Lammiter decided, as conversation became general and harmless around him, Eleanor would make a very good countess. He could imagine her standing at the head of a marble staircase, extending a tight white kid glove to stiff white shirtfronts. She’d make a most attractive countess, he had to admit. And she was in love with Pirotta. She kept watching the Italian, silently, wide-eyed. Truly, as Eleanor herself would say, she was in love with her man, and not just with a marble staircase. What about Pirotta? He was in love, too. There was no doubt about that.

  “But you aren’t going? So soon?” the princess said as he rose. She stopped arranging her large grey straw hat (with its pink and blue flowers so carefully matched to the printed roses on her grey silk suit) and looked at him with amazement. “Why you’ve been so polite listening to all our chatter that you haven’t even told me what you’ve done with Rosana.” She flashed a glance at his startled face. “What have you done?”

  Bertrand Whitelaw said, “He has kidnapped her and is holding her for ransom. That is, after all, one of America’s favourite indoor sports. Isn’t it, Mr. Lammiter?”

  Bill Lammiter studied Whitelaw silently.

  “Now, Bertrand!” the princess chided, absolutely delighted. “After all, the Americans pay you enough for six lectures—or is it one lecture given six times?—to keep you living in Italy for the other forty-six weeks of the year. One shouldn’t snap at the hand that feeds one. At least, not too obviously.”

  “Indeed I am not anti-American,” Whitelaw insisted earnestly. “On the contrary, I am the greatest admirer of America’s contribution to civilisation. A dry Martini, Principessa, is not to be sneezed at.”

  “Aren’t you forgetting bubble gum?” Lammiter asked, too quietly.

  The princess said quickly, “Ah, you must read Bertrand’s column each week, Mr. Lammiter. Or don’t you read?—I mean, the London papers?”

  “Not column. Heaven forbid,” Whitelaw said reprovingly.

  “No, indeed. It’s a sermon,” Pirotta said and gave a genial laugh. Somehow, the tensions relaxed. Lammiter, sitting very still, had to give Pirotta credit for his expert diplomacy. The light laugh, applied at the right moment, was always a solution. There were others. But then, Lammiter decided, I am obviously no diplomat. He looked at Pirotta thoughtfully. It was disconcerting to find Pirotta’s handsome eyes quietly measuring him.

  “The odd thing about Bertrand,” the princess said, “is that he lives so little in England and yet he is always so clever about what England ought to do. Why, he might be an American after all, mightn’t he, Mr. Lammiter? By the way, I am curious. What have you done with Rosana?”

  Lammiter said stiffly, and he hoped he sounded a little embarrassed and rueful and just a touch disappointed, “Miss Di Feo had another engagement.”

  “She ran out on you, old boy? Too bad, too bad,” Whitelaw said. Then, most unexpectedly, he added, “What about lunch with me?”

  “Splendid,” Pirotta said quickly, and smiled over at Eleanor. “We are just about to leave, too.”

  “Not yet, not yet!” the princess said sharply, seeing her company suddenly dissolving. Her two young men came to life at the anxiety in her voice. They cocked their heads worriedly, like two very faithful and alert French poodles. “First, we must decide what to do with Rosana.”

  “Must we?” murmured Whitelaw. “And before luncheon?” He sighed.

  The princess looked at him silkily. Heaven help him, Lammiter thought. She went on talking. “Rosana runs away from all attractive young men. She never comes to see me, or any of her mother’s old friends. She avoids us, I think. Of course, her brother— Do you think she is avoiding us all because of Mario?”

  Lammiter, watching, suddenly saw anger in Pirotta’s eyes. But the Italian’s voice was non-committal. “Let us not talk about Mario.”

  “Of course, you knew him. And liked him. We all did. Poor Mario,” the princess sighed.

  “Poor Mario?” Whitelaw asked. “Now I am interested.”

  “Do you remember the scandal last year? Mario was found dead, naked, in his bedroom. Odd, wasn’t it, to commit suicide without one’s clothes on? People usually are so careful about appearances when they are dead.”

  “Oh!” Whitelaw remembered now. “Drugs. Am I right?”

  “Yes... Drugs. So vulgar... And it concerned the sons and daughters of several well-known families. Horrid, wasn’t it, Luigi?”

  Pirotta was watching her. His face was controlled. He nodded.

  “We were all so upset. One was afraid to look in the newspapers in case one knew the names. And of course, Bertrand”—and
now the bright amber eyes were turned on the Englishman—“the Communists tried to make a festival of denunciation out of the whole sordid business. They began holding meetings, wrote editorials, organised parades. You know how they behave! And then—but don’t you remember?”

  Whitelaw said, “I was away lecturing at the time.” He and Pirotta exchanged one look. To Lammiter, it seemed as if everyone had forgotten about him, as if there were a secret battle in progress. And then, suddenly, he began to feel that the princess was staging all this scene with a purpose. For his benefit? The little glance she flashed him now seemed to draw him into the centre of it all.

  “Then you missed so much fun,” she told Whitelaw. “For some really clever journalist discovered that there were Communists, too, who were mixed up with all the scandal. So, of course, a great silence descended. But everyone knows that there are still some hidden drug rings. And with Communists running them, I hear.”

  “Oh, really!” Whitelaw exclaimed. He tried to hide his growing amusement. He smiled at the two other men. “Come, come—one doesn’t believe everything one hears. Especially in Rome.” He turned to Lammiter. “The Romans are so nimble-witted that they supply the most delicious gossip to suit any situation.”

  Pirotta laughed. “If we didn’t have the situations, we’d invent them.”

  “Besides,” Whitelaw said consolingly, “you can’t be afraid of your Communists in Italy. Now really, Principessa! They’re such delightful people.”

  The princess said, disarmingly sweet, “I did not mean our nice Communists, who want to help the workers. I meant the real Communists—who shoot the workers. As in Poznan last month.”